Fracture
by thebananahasspoken
Summary: Aliza had always known she was meant for more than her grandmother's abuse, than her exclusion from society. It was only with the finding of Frisk's journal, and the climbing of the cursed mountain, that she truly came to know her purpose, though. The story of Axetale. Axetale AU
1. The Chasm Yawns

Inspired by Horrortale by sour-apple-studios, I bring you... Fracture, the story of Axetale. This AU is of my own creation, with the help of my dear friend Azul. The universe is almost fully fleshed out, though has yet to be put in good order, and this is the beginning of the canon story for it all. Please bear in mind that within, you will find horror, abuse, character death in needless detail, blood, gore, cannibalism, disfigurement, body horror, mental illness, and a world almost, almost familiar.

These aren't your friends anymore, though. Remember that.

* * *

**Fracture**

**Chapter One: The Chasm Yawns**

* * *

Hospitals were always so cold, but no matter how many blankets she asked for, Edna could always feel the chill clinging to her withered bones, like so much ice on the breath of winter, despite the warmth of the sun through the shaded windows, from the many lamps and the piled, thick covers. She would tell her visitors she suspected it was the souls of the passed, awaiting her joining them in their uneasy afterlife. She would speak to the ghosts of days gone by, in the quiet hours, chatting about this and that.

She used to, anyway, before the doctors had changed her medication. _'It will make the last days easier, if you sleep more,' _they had said. Bah. It only made the dreams more vivid and, at times, more terrifying.

She would bob to the surface of consciousness on occasion, drifting on bare lucidity for a moment before slipping back down into the thick waters of drugged slumber. She fought so hard, to resist the pull of the almost inescapable sleep, the soothing draw of oblivion. She didn't want to be soothed, didn't want to sleep away the last dregs of her existence. She struggled, and often, with all her might to stay awake, fearful of that chasm just below the surface, where only darkness and something colder lay.

This fated morning, she didn't have to fight. Something pulled her from her sleep with a jolt and a gasp.

Rising to the waking world with a twitch of near paralytic limbs, Edna opened her eyes to peer around the dark room she resided in, blinking blearily about in the dim light. Reading the digital clock was useless with her old eyes (was that a four or a seven?), so she turned her muddled gaze to the curtained window for aid.

Ah, no light was escaping the shades yet, parted just enough to shine the summer sun across her while she "rested" during the daytime. It must still be night, or very early morning.

Her eyelids were heavy with her diminished sleep, and breathing was a struggle, her cracked lips parted in her exertion to draw breath. It took her sluggish thoughts a moment to realize just how tight her chest was… that the beeping from the heart monitor was staggered, silent for far too long between reactions. Her fingers tightened in the crumpled sheets, her throat dry and clenched with realization.

It was close.

The old woman could feel it, the terrible, cold mist of death clutching at her heart, and she shied away, her breath even shorter and more labored.

S-she didn't… want to go… not… yet… n o, she had thought she was ready, but she wasn't...

The shadows beyond her hazy vision, dotted now with tears and the film of the impending end, shifted, startling her with their motion. She forced her eyes open, wide as she could, to try to see the creature that had come for her. All she could see was it's dark hood, in the blighted, lingering night, how it hovered over her bedside in bleak, somber silence.

She couldn't move, couldn't blink, couldn't speak to plea for it to _not take her yet _; the machines wailing in the far distant background diminished, fading into the ether of her consciousness.

Nothing stopped the approach of the reaper; it's shadow seemed to stretch to the ceiling, out to cover the bare light from the bedside lamp… to engulf the very earth itself in the grasp of its icy claw. Edna choked out a gurgle of air, one last attempt to deny its approach, as she looked to its face.

It had no face, in the nightmare of her last moments, though.

It had only eyes, and they _glowed _, golden as the sun one moment and icy as the air suffusing her withered lungs the next; they burned down to her very soul, filling her mind with soft promises, kind assurance and a song of peace, as she felt herself begin to fade.

It reached a hand for her, thin and surprisingly small; she saw, as though through another's eyes, her own hand reach out to take the proffered grasp.

Her body grew limp the moment their hands met, and in the background, the frantic beeping of the monitors flatlined.

The nurse that rushed in moments later found Edna with her glassy eyes wide open, a glistening tear streak and a small smile on her slackened face, and the shadows gathered around her deathbed disappearing into the night.

Her window hung open, and the curtains blew on a cool breeze, the tassels of a ghost.

* * *

Boots pounded against the pavement of a small, dirty alley not too far from the hospital, the quick, resonant footsteps bouncing off the bricked walls and bent, smelly dumpsters; a long shadow grew in the shuddering light of a nearly burnt out lamp, thrown across the sidewalk that heralded the end of the alley and the beginning of the well-to-do neighborhood street it emerged onto.

It was not a large figure, imposing nor threatening, that emerged from the darkness, however, but a short, diminutive personage, clad in tattered blue jeans and a dark pink hoodie, clinging to a ratty backpack and sparking with odd suffusions of light, flickering in the wake of their quickened footsteps. They turned onto the street and, with a turn of their head to check for traffic, charged across the asphalt to the other side, again ducking into the lingering shadow of a tall fence and pulling at their hood to keep their face hidden.

The figure kept their cover, and their quick beat, until they were several blocks away from the hospital, and stopped to catch their breath behind the cover of an advert signpost, gasping and slinging their backpack around by the strap to check its contents.

From within, they pulled a capsule shaped container, seemingly made of glass and shining, silvery metal, no bigger than their forearm and filled with fluttering, oddly cartoonish hearts, glowing in different colors and floating ethereally in the space within the capsule. The hearts, bumping against each other almost intelligently, cast a warm, multicolored illumination across the person's face, beneath their hood, for the first time not buried in shadow.

It was the face of a young girl, no more than fifteen, with a button nose, pale, chapped lips that reflected the thinness of the rest of her body, round cheeks that did not, and light brown hair, cropped sloppily to her shoulders, that hung in her eyes perpetually, in seeming spite of her efforts to brush it behind her ears.

Her eyes were the most striking thing about her appearance, almond shaped and sparking with latent power her lithe form would not betray, glowing oddly with, at the moment, a vivid, electrically blue hue, though they flashed bright red when a car drove through a puddle nearby, her gaze flashing to the disturbance and then immediately back to her quarry.

Her name was Aliza, and she had just collected her last soul.

The aforementioned soul, a reddish-orange heart beating vigorously with it's all too recent life, tapped insistently against the glass encasing it, trying to escape to take its rightful place in the universe, and she smiled at it regretfully, inspecting it for cracks or dark spots before, upon finding none (Edna had been a strong, brave woman in life; she'd come to visit her often, before she'd been secluded to the ICU), sliding the container back into her backpack and zipping it back up.

She wished she could tell the souls in her possession that they wouldn't be trapped for much longer. They never seemed aware of her, or her words of comfort… but the journal had said as much. The only way to truly know or communicate with them would be to absorb them, and that was a dangerous road to travel.

There was no way she could chance such a thing when the risk of insanity was apparently so great. She could barely handle her own magic.

Aliza, shaking her head at her musings and again shouldering her pack, sent a glance behind her, to the far off helicopter pad on the top of the barely visible hospital, verdant trees and the peaked roofs of a hundred houses obscuring the rest from her sight.

She had been lucky to get away so cleanly, with how much of a fuss Edna had made. Gathering souls from the hospital was always risky, given all the cameras and staff, but it was the easiest way to get them. The nursing home had far more security (they'd kicked her out enough to know that), and the souls had dispersed by the time the bodies were taken to funeral homes or graveyards.

She certainly wasn't going to kill anyone to get them, that was for _sure _… and they had to be collected. Depressing, harrowing work that it was, it was necessary.

Aliza, with a sigh, settled her backpack more securely and slid her hands into her hoodie's pockets as she inspected the skies (the stars were fading, the space between them lightening into shades of blue and grey; it would be dawn soon, she needed to make tracks), tossing her head to shoo the trio of insects that floated aimlessly about her head away.

The nearly see through, ivory butterflies scattered, disturbed by the motion, before flocking together again around the larger, less ethereal wings of the crimson butterfly settled on the top of the girl's hood, clinging to the material and raising its head to the coming sunrise.

To the casual observer, the bugs flitting around Aliza constantly appeared as wisps, cotton on the breeze, flecks of light thrown from a passing mirror… perhaps even fireflies; no one had ever seen them for what they were, paid mind to their obvious sentience. Humans, the journal had told her, were either completely unable to see magic, or simply unwilling to accept it, though. That certainly seemed the case, judging from the general ignorance her familiars (a name she had plucked from a movie she'd rented, about Merlin, she wanted to say) were treated with.

She didn't mind. Not like she needed the extra attention. Her own magic and oddity got her enough of that.

"Come on, guys. We gotta go. Lay low for me."

The butterflies dimmed obediently at her words, and fluttered behind her to drift about her ankles more discreetly as she resumed her long, hurried stride, glancing up and down the still mercifully empty street before ducking again into the cover of her hood, making her way to the bus stop just at the edge of Main.

She made the first pickup just in time, slipping through the doors just as they closed and dropping a handful of change into the bin before shimmying between the bus seats; not a lot of people were up this hour, the only ones on the way to graveyard shifts further uptown, so it was no struggle to find her favorite seat at the back, next to the window with all the hearts drawn onto it with Sharpie. The driver gave her a passing glance, unused to seeing children out at this hour, but said nothing, as did the other three passengers, too tired and unconcerned to give much notice.

Small blessings. She hated the overbearing grandmothers that tried to sit by her and clean her face, only to shy away at the strangeness of her eyes, the static that always seemed to pop from her fingers, the simple oddity of her existence.

Some days she resented it, being so different. In the wake of her victory that morning, she couldn't be happier.

Her leg jiggled in excitement and anticipation as she looked out over the waking town of Ebott as the bus pulled away from the curb and onto the mostly deserted street, her palms itching with the impulse to look through the journal, to read again the plan that had been set out before her, but hesitated in lieu of prying eyes, picking instead at an old, patched hole in her pack instead, barely able to hold back her smile.

This was it. She was finally ready! She had found the container, gotten the souls, all seven of them, had followed the journal's instructions to the letter; it had taken years, years of deciphering the scrabble of insane letters, scrawlings, etchings, and scribbles that comprised her one connection to her sordid, lost past (it was hard enough to read regular books on their own, the way the words swam all over the place), years to figure out how to successfully harvest souls (so many had broken in her hands, falling to pieces and swirling away into magic unknown)... and now there was only the last step left.

The final plunge, in every sense.

Her stomach twisted in anxiety, doubt eating at her in a moment of clouded clarity. Her fingers drifted to the only other relic she had of the journal's author, the priceless, fine trio of platinum chains around her wrist and the sapphire gem strung on them, hidden from view under her dirty, tattered sleeve. She stroked her fingertips over the gemmed charm, but the sense of calm and peace that both it and her animal guides, settled on her torn jeans and gently flapping their wings with the sway of the bus, always gave her just wasn't coming.

It was a fragile thing, her confidence. She didn't have the… the… she didn't know the word for it. Strength, she supposed? The strength the author had had. The wherewithal to press on despite all odds. She had done so much, for a race of people all others would have shunned, at the mere age of eleven. She had intended to do more, and lost her life because of it.

Aliza herself had brought an end to that legacy with her birth.

She dropped her head into her hands, closing her eyes and rubbing her temples. It helped nothing, thinking like this, but it was all she had ever been told. That she was nothing compared to the woman her mother could have been. Smart. Kind. Caring. And so strong… she was nothing like her. She had been a leech on her belly, unwanted and worthless. A burden. A menace. A _murderer _. Not even teachers had been able to handle her, much less her grandmother. Unloved. Unneeded. Useless.

What had made her think she could do this?

A flash of red sparked in her lap, drawing her attention away from her inner struggle and to her knees, to where Ruby, the large, crimson butterfly, sat, wings still and multifaceted eyes directed up to her. Aliza sniffled, wiping her nose on the back of her hand, before holding out her hand and letting the ghostly insect crawl into her palm.

The calm she had been looking for in reaching for her mother's bracelet swept over her as the butterfly settled in her hand, flapping its iridescent wings slowly; she couldn't understand what it was trying to communicate, never had and likely never would…

But she knew, at the very least, that it meant some level of comfort for her, and even that modicum brightened her heart, and something more inside that she now knew as her soul, and she smiled down at the butterfly wetly, wiping the remainder of her tears onto the shoulder of her hoodie.

"Thank you," she whispered, and ran a gentle fingertip over the insect's antennae, giggling to herself at the warm glow it let out in response, and spent the rest of the bus ride watching the sun rise, drumming her fingers on the windowsill.

It wasn't a long trip, unfortunately, and where the bus dropped her off, just a few feet away from a graffitied 7-11, she was going to have to walk the rest of the way. Seven miles, through a maze of run down neighborhoods, trashy businesses, and partially along the side of a busy highway. It wasn't the safest path to travel so early in the morning (or any time, honestly, but the morning crush was in full sway now, and coffee high businessmen weren't the most conscientious behind the wheel), but she'd done it many times before.

She walked quickly and with purpose, alert for any vehicles, or people, giving her undue notice. She had a Swiss Army knife on her, right in her front pocket for easy access, but it was hardly necessary. Her hands, balled in her jacket pockets, sparked with magic, beginning to heat as she spied a pair of hooded figures across the street watching her pass. She clenched her fingers into even tighter fists, ready to pull them out at a moment's notice to defend herself (please don't set her jacket on fire again, please don't, she liked this one)...

But the moment passed, they didn't move to follow or harass her, and she passed by unmolested, breathing out a sigh and trying to calm her thundering heart.

Her fiery hands didn't quell, though, singing the insides of her pockets and sending her butterflies into a mild panic, and wouldn't defuse until she turned into her neighborhood, finally wicking out in two very suspicious curls of smoke, simmering from her pockets in a stream in her wake.

Just another reason she had no desire to absorb the souls herself, despite her mother's insistence that her progeny would be capable of wielding them. Magical though she certainly was, she had little to no control over her "powers", which liked to spring into life at their own whim and wont. Fire seemed to be the most prevalent of her sorcerous talents (her element, she assumed, though it too came and went as it pleased), but trying to control any of her magicks was like trying to grab a fish from a waterfall while wearing a blindfold, anything more than handling human souls just out of her reach.

She'd ended up teleporting herself onto just as many roofs as she had frozen her bathwater and set her own hair on fire.

Last year, however, her powers had cruelly redeemed themselves when someone had tried to mug her during her scavenging for paper products behind the Dollar Tree. She could still hear his screams. The scorched flesh, where she had touched his face, where his clothes had burnt away. The writhing, gory, half dead creature on the pavement that had writhed in and choked on its own blood. It had been _horrifying _.

She had been sick every time she thought of it, locked herself in her bedroom for a month and stewed in despair and petrified guilt when she had heard that the man had died from his wounds. It had been _months _before she had been able to go out to find more souls, incapable of facing down death again in her state.

Aliza tugged at her hood, the wind picking up as the sun rose higher in the brightening sky; it was strong enough to nearly pluck her hood from her head. She picked up the pace, ducking her head to avoid the curious gazes of the housewives watering their lawns, passing by houses and cars and fences and bent mailboxes that might have been nice fifty years ago, before the wear and tear of the highland clime.

Her grandmother, Eloise, had inherited a house from her own grandmother here, and hadn't felt the need to move anywhere else since. The house was falling apart, an ancient, termite riddled, weather beaten monstrosity of a thing, painted a dusty pink long faded into ambiguity and draped with broken, greenish shutters, and Aliza hated it more every time she went back to it.

She'd be rid of it soon, though, and never come back. She had a fate bigger than this place, bigger than anyone that had ever put her down, she knew it, and completing her mother's work was only the beginning.

The abysmal carapace of her grandmother's house, set on a wild, untamed plot of land far larger than the home itself, came into view with the street's next turn, but Aliza made no move to approach the cracked, paint chipped double doors the stood ominously in shadow beneath the crumbling second story balcony, instead rounding the side of the house by way of a well trodden path through the weeds and briars to one of the back windows, hopping a short, rusty garden fence as she went.

She slipped inside with practiced ease, the pane greased to allow her completely silent entry, and closed it after her, casting a wary eye around the interior of the outdated, filthy washroom as she did so. Her nose crinkled habitually from the smell of body odor, mildew, and old food that permeated the room, and the house beyond, but she paid the source little mind as she let herself out of the water closet and tiptoed to the stairs, glancing at the sagging entryway to the living room before mounting them, avoiding piles of clothes, balled up paper, ripped boxes, and crusty dishes as she went.

The home had turned into something of a landfill since her grandmother had gone… more than a little mad (the doctors had called it… alls heemers? Eloise hadn't bought it, though, and had refused to pay for the medications or treatments or even consider paying for a facility). She had tried to clean it up, tried again every few weeks, but no matter how hard she tried, or how subtle she attempted to be, her grandmother would always catch her and beat at her with that stupid cane and scream at her until she went hoarse.

"_ You don't know what's trash and what's good, you just throw everything away! Don't touch my stuff, you ungrateful maggot _!"

Her butterfly companions rested on her shoulders, flapping languidly and throwing glowing shadows across the peeling, yellowed wallpaper, as she wearily trudged to her room, where it was much cleaner, fresh laundry and herbs lingering in the close air of her small, dingy space. She shut and locked the door as quietly as possible behind herself, trying her best to keep from disturbing her grandmother as long as possible (she didn't ever wake up this early; it was better she didn't, to be honest, the last thing Aliza needed was the old bat snooping into her business again), before crossing to the dresser set below her little window, the shiny bits and baubles of her collection of little treasures (glass marbles, an old Christmas ornament studded with false crystal, tin figurines) catching the new light of the rising sun.

Ever so carefully, she removed the soul filled canister from her backpack and set it on the sun speckled surface, its inhabitants bobbing up and down in what little space was left, crowding each other to seek out the warmth. She wished idly, as she rubbed her thumbs over the glass, counting the heart shaped souls obsessively, that the other six containers had survived the years as well as this one. All the others had broken though… she supposed she was lucky this one, vacuum sealed and nearly pristine but for a few chips here and there, had lived out the years in her grandmother's care so well.

She sighed, a smile pulling at her lips as she watched the cartoonish hearts twist and beat in the golden light.

Seven, at _last _. She was finally ready. She only hoped things went as well in the second stage of the plan.

The butterflies, clearly aware of her thoughts, crawled and flitted down her arms to rest on her hands and on the canister encouragingly, glittering in jewel tones and exuding the tranquility she so needed. She chuckled under her breath, thankful all over again for their companionship and guidance; she couldn't have done any of this without them.

She never would have found her mother's journal in the crowded, dusty attic, crammed into boxes of old medical records and strung with cobwebs; never would have found the soul containers, the gently glowing bracelet strung about her wrist. Couldn't have handled the shattering of the first twenty something souls, in her fumbling. Wouldn't have had the patience to attempt to read the journal, once she had assembled it from the scattered pages of her mother's insane ramblings, her eyes stinging and her mind numb and aching with each new attempt.

Couldn't have survived the years of her grandmother's abuse and neglect, certainly. They were her only friends, in a world that neither wanted nor cared about her. Humans were cruel beings, that was certain. Anything different from them was to be castigated and shunned.

Perhaps, like her mother before her… she would find her place with the people underground.

Aliza was gentle in shaking the butterflies from her fingers, in her considerations, nudging Ruby's thick abdomen dotingly as it sunned itself atop the container, before she left her animal companions to rest from their adventure, crossing to her bed (a sunken mattress set on the floorboards, mounded with rumpled, balled up sheets) to dig the rest of her belongings from her pack.

Settling onto the pokey mattress and pressing her back to the crumbling wall beside it, she, with great care, dug the journal out of her bag, the yellowing pages crinkling where they stuck out here and there from under the makeshift cover (she had stolen it from an old dictionary, an attempt to keep the already water and time damaged pages and ripped folder covers and medical notes safe from more wear), along with a magnifying glass, setting both in her lap before cracking open the large tome.

She traced her fingers over the first page, scribbled ad nauseum with iterations of her mother's name (Frisk… just as beautiful as the few pictures her grandmother had of her around the house), before flipping to a worn transcript, perused many times by her own hand, describing the ritual she had labored to obtain the human souls for in the first place, the process the trapped race beneath the mountain would need to go through to gain passage back to the human world from their prison below.

One of their people, described only by the name Sans (it was a name repeated often, almost obsessively, through the journal, often in conjunction with delusional pleas for mercy and forgiveness) and the title Keeper of Justice, would have to take the souls, absorb them into themselves, and destroy the ancient magic that surrounded Mt. Ebott, a feat she knew she was far from capable of doing herself.

It was the only way they could all be free, the only way to shatter the barrier that had kept the race sequestered to the Underground for nearly fifteen hundred years, imprisoned to a system of caves and tunnels quickly growing too small for their population... where her mother had lived for so long, among a people dubbed as literal monsters.

Frisk, or Francene, as her grandmother insisted on calling her, had gone missing for years, over a whole decade; she had run when she was just a little girl lost in the foster care system, taken from her mother for much the same abuse and neglect Aliza suffered now. Everyone had thought she had run to a larger city, or suffered much worse and simply never been found.

But twelve years after she had mysteriously disappeared, without notice or trace, she had reappeared with just as little notice, found beaten, broken, and raving in an alley behind a drugstore. She was taken to the nearby hospital, treated for her wounds and the indignity she had suffered (Aliza flinched at the thought, mind shrinking away habitually)...

And that was when Frisk had told one of the nurses about where she had been for so long, about magic and monsters and her life under the mountain. She had been frantic to leave the hospital, clinging to a glass canister filled with a fluttering light and ranting about ineffable danger; she had to find more souls. She had to return to her husband, he was waiting for her, they _all _were.

She had to save them, there was no one else that could.

The doctors had thought she was insane. Declared her mentally unstable, detained her and sent her to the asylum on the edge of the city. Drugged her until she was permanently damaged, and kept her insane rantings in a neat little box, dismissed as the lunacy of a mad woman.

Aliza sighed, her lips twitching in distaste for the way her mother had been treated (she had had her doubts too, when she had first found the disordered array of pages… but they had explained so much about her odd life, made so much more sense than her just being a singular oddity, that she had _had _to believe them), and rubbed her fingers across a sketch of a smiling pair of skeletons, one tall and skinny and one short and squat (there were many, _many _drawings of the shorter one; always smiling or winking cheekily), knowing that she herself was proof that her mother's ramblings had held some truth.

Truth of magic and monsters and souls, truth that no one had wanted to see, turning a blind eye to the obviously paranormal abilities and strength her mother had exhibited during her stay at the asylum. The pages had been chock full of reports of fires, bizarre powers, and "accidents" that Aliza clung to fiercely, desperate for the identifying point she shared with the woman she had never known, taken before she had even opened her eyes.

It was such a relief, to know she wasn't the only one that had been just a little odd, that had had magic and been considered different. For Frisk, it had been to her bitter end, robbed of her ability to help those she had loved so dearly by the stigma and ignorance of small minds. Aliza wouldn't let her efforts be in vain, though.

She would take up her mantle. She would bring the souls back to the mountain, find this Sans, this Keeper of Justice, and free the monster race. It was her duty, just as it had been her mother's, and it was with this fierce determination lighting her soul that Aliza settled onto her side on her lumpy mattress, shutting her eyes for a few moments to gain some much needed rest for the journey ahead.

She would wake in a few hours, with plenty to spare before her grandmother awoke. She would make her escape unhindered, and set out on the journey of her lifetime with nought at her back but the bolstering wind her heart was carried on.

She hugged the journal closer to her as she fell into slumber, and in the growing rays of the sun, the scarlet butterfly flexed its wings atop the capsule of souls, throwing a pattern of translucent reds across the dozing child's closed eyelids.

* * *

Aliza awoke, with a start and a quiet gasp, to something of a ruckus, the walls of her haven shaking and her head throbbing slightly; she quickly dismissed it as someone driving past the house playing too loud music (jerks), and rolled back over to slip back into her slumber... but before she could drift back under the waves of her strangely pleasant dream (it had been so warm, laughter and welcome and what she had always imagined family would feel like filling her heart), something tickled the end her nose.

She swatted at it lazily, suspicious of one of the dust bunnies that liked to drift down from the attic on occasion, but rather than subsiding, it instead bit her.

She jolted up with a yelp, wiping at her nose and snapping open her bleary, glowing golden eyes in her shock, to see Ruby darting frantically about her head, fluttering its wings in distress.

It took a moment of following the butterfly's path with her tired eyes, yawning and scratching at her leg, before Aliza realized what had woken her up in the first place. Heavy footsteps were tromping down the stairs outside her locked door, her grandmother no doubt giving up on her stalemate with the unmoving door and the sleeping teenager beyond to search for the spare key that no longer existed, due to some interference on a certain butterfly's part (Ruby had found and stolen it years ago).

Aliza groaned, rubbing her face and rolling out of bed as quickly as she could. She needed to get everything in order, she had _way _overslept; judging from the angle of the sun through her little window, it was at the very least noon. She must have been more tired than she had thought...

She surreptitiously stuffed the journal, the soul canister, her supplies, and everything else that might suggest her upcoming departure into her backpack, hiding it behind a loose panel in the wall under her window as an afterthought, before clattering through her door noisily and down the stairs as loudly as possible, to let her grandmother know she was coming. The snarling she-beast had a habit of going through her things if she wasn't placated, and Aliza couldn't afford any more setbacks.

Losing the fifth soul from a deep crack in it had been setback enough. She couldn't afford any more, not when she was so close to leaving.

She bounced on her toes on the last step down the stairs at the thought, giddy and ecstatic.

_Leaving _.

She couldn't wait.

Aliza found her grandmother in the kitchen, standing on a quickly collapsing box and tearing through the knickknack filled cabinets, and cleared her throat to gain the vulture's attention, pausing in the doorway and standing stiffly in place while Eloise, starting at the noise, turned sharply to glare at her, looking over the edge of a pair of cracked, dirty reading glasses that had slipped to the end of her nose through beady, bloodshot, sludge brown eyes.

"Why wouldn't you open the door?" she barked as she clambered down from her improvised stool, rounding on the girl and propping her hands on her bony hips. Her graying, feathery, thin hair flew about her head in a wispy cloud of agitation, and Aliza tried not to stare at it, keeping her face straight as she shrugged her shoulders stiffly, opening her mouth to answer but, unsurprisingly, finding herself talked over, her grandmother charging on without pause.

"What if I had needed you for something important? And what were you doing? You shouldn't be sleeping this late! I bet you heard me. You heard me and didn't open the door. I'm going to find that screw driver and take off that damn knob," the older woman muttered, and turned to look at the counters as though she would find it peeking through the mounds of refuse piling the surfaces, going to the nearest rubbage heap and sifting through it while Aliza, rolling her eyes and sighing gruffly, deflected as best as she could.

"I'm sorry, I was up late reading and I guess I couldn't hear you."

Technically true. She had been reading the journal last night while she waited out Edna's last breaths.

The butterflies, perched on the doorway and Aliza's rumpled hoodie's shoulders, sat at still attention, wings sharply posed, while Eloise scoffed, swiping a pile of trash from the counter and onto the already cluttered floor.

"Like hell you couldn't, I could have been having a heart attack and you would have just slept on through- but I guess you would want that to happen wouldn't you? I could die on the couch and no one would know. Suit you just fine, you wouldn't care," she choked on her words, tears running down her cheeks as she stomped away from the counter to shove past Aliza violently, letting herself into the living room to collapse dramatically onto one of the cluttered, dusty couches.

Aliza, eyes flashing red as she caught herself on a pile of boxes in the wake of her grandmother's temper, followed at a distance, expression fixed and carefully empty. She said nothing, letting the woman have her tirade. She went through this cycle nearly every day, damning her for her neglect of her own family, how uncaring she was of her poor grandmother and the state of her health.

She would care more if she didn't know better. There was nothing wrong with the woman's heart. What she needed was mental care, but she still refused it.

Eloise, weeping inconsolably on her lounge, wiped the back of a spidery hand across her eyes, glaring wetly at the girl lingering in the doorway of the cloistered nest of a living room.

"You should know better, Aliza! You're sixteen, you have to be more responsible. If you lost me you'd be thrown into the foster system. You don't want that, do you? A girl your age, no one would take you, especially considering how lazy and selfish you are."

_Fifteen _, she corrected within, but kept that to herself, knowing better than to talk back with her in this state. She just needed to ride this out... placate her grandmother, keep up the whole step and dance of calming her down.

Yes, yes, of _course _she would leave her doors unlocked for now on. Of _course _she promised to come to her aid. She would do better. She _did _care. Yes, she was right. So selfish and self centered. How _dare _she.

Fifteen minutes of consoling, of long, exhausting assurances and lies, and at last the screaming stopped, subsiding into tearful huffing and the lit end of a cigarette, Eloise sniffling from her perch and dabbing at her nose with a soiled handkerchief.

"Maybe you should sleep down here again, like when you were little. Remember that? You used to cling to me. You should sleep on the pull out, with my heart the way it is. You'd never hear me upstairs," she simpered as she puffed on her cigarette, her eyes growing distant and sentimental, with an addled sort of detachment that Aliza had come to know well.

"Yeah, I'll think about it."

"You and I would travel everywhere, wouldn't we, Francene? It would be like the time we went camping in that van. Maybe we should go camping…"

They had never gone camping. They had never traveled in a van. They'd certainly never had any good times that Aliza could remember, but it was useless to claim such things. Eloise was obviously far more contented with her false memories, calmed by the days long past.

She would get like this, sometimes, especially after they had been arguing. She would start calling Aliza her mother's name, insisting they had done things that they never had, recalling memories that had never happened, such as burning pancakes, or going on bike rides around the park. It was very uncomfortable, but whatever she needed to be happy, she supposed.

Outside her ruminations, Eloise seemed to snap back into reality and sighed around her cigarette, inspecting her dirty seat cushion with a chagrined set to her lips.

"We shouldn't fight, we're all we have left, yeah? Just like… just like your mother and I. Us against the world. You're a lot like her. Spitten image, and just as willful and stubborn."

Aliza sucked in a breath, raising her eyes to her grandmother, their irises a sparkling blue. Such sentiment from her was fleeting and scarce. Just as fleeting fondness bubbled in her heart, a swell of emotion and pride for the rare compli-

"We never fought, though. She wasn't the type. But I guess it's not your fault, it's probably from your father's side. Just like those ugly, ugly eyes."

That small, sweet feeling crumbled and darkened into acid, poisoning the pit of her stomach. She tasted ash and bile on the back of her tongue, her throat glued shut and her mouth filled with venom, unable to form the words to describe her building rage, her utter loathing.

How **d a r e** she mention that man, that disgusting, _vile _-

She was done.

"I'm going to pick up some soup and beans from the store."

Her voice was cold and emotionless, hollow as she felt inside, in the wake of such a terrible insult. She stood up and walked out the front doors before her grandmother could offer any rebuttal, slamming them after her and glorying in the rattle of the old, cracked windows in the carapace of the corpse of a house.

Her feet ached and protested, tingling with sparks of magic that pulled at her flesh, tempting her to attempt a jump, but she marched across the wild lawn and vaulted the peeling, broken picket fence nevertheless, needing the air and time that a walk would give her. The grocery store was a mile away, plenty of time to breathe and calm her furious reaction.

Her familiars floated about her, brushing her cheeks with the tips of their wings in an attempt at comfort, but she ignored them, pulling her hood back over her head, stuffing her hands into her pockets, and lengthening her already quick stride, her eyes flashing a dangerous red as she stewed and steamed and growled under her breath, kicking cans in gutters and glaring at passing cars.

She had wanted to fight back, scream her own accusations in return for the low, pathetic blow. To cry at how insensitive it was. But she couldn't. The tears wouldn't come, like they had when she had been younger. No, there was only anger now, anger and absolute fury for the repeated offense of being so degraded for so long by someone who had no room to point fingers.

How was it conceivable to still try to blame her for the manner of her own birth? She hated the man that had done that to her mother too. She hadn't asked to be conceived like that. She wouldn't have wished her mother's fate on anyone.

She hadn't wanted to be a rape baby any more than Frisk had asked to be violated in that alley.

Aliza stayed in the small grocery store for hours, looking over _everything _and picking out things she might need (she honestly had no idea how big the Underground was, how she was going to find the Keeper of Justice down there, so the extra boxes of granola would likely come in handy), before trudging back to her grandmother's house under the rising curve of a crescent moon, long after the old woman had given up on her and gone to bed.

All that was left was to fetch her pack from her room. She packed her newly acquired supplies into it, stowing her little pile of shiny treasures and the compass she had found within as well, before, without a backwards glance, Aliza crawled out the loose window for the last time, setting out into the night with purpose and intent...

And Mt. Ebott rose in the distance, beckoning her to the greatest adventure she would ever experience.

* * *

The lonely mountain peak wasn't hard to get to, despite the barbed wire fences and the legends surrounding it (it was only another short bus ride, a few questioning glances, and a moderately arduous hike away); it stood as it always had, just at the edge of the town that had been named after it, stark against the wide sky and encapsulated with a ring of thick clouds around its apex, forested with century old trees and exuding a presence of both menace and majesty with its face alone.

It was finding the entrance to the Underground itself that was proving to be something of a feat.

Aliza and her butterfly companions had been wandering the mountainside for almost two days now, swatting at gnats and fighting through overgrown brambles and consulting the sketchy, vague map her mother had drawn on a torn, stained piece of notebook paper, often wandering in circles multiple times without realizing. The mountain had changed with the years, landmark trees felled in deforesting attempts and rockfalls blocking paths or completely altering the face of the landscape; the only thing that had kept them on a steady climb up the hillside had been her familiars, floating before her and leading her around the worst of the landslides, through the thickest grouse copses and the most winding, back turning of paths.

They had seemed to become almost entranced the moment they had climbed over the first of the chain link fences around Mt. Ebott, leading her down hidden paths and along impossibly concealed byways that she had hoped would lead their little party in the right direction. The ghostly insects would get frustrated when the path they had chosen was too overgrown, or when the ground itself had eroded away from flooding, but always seemed to find another way, floating on through gusts of wind and even a torrential rainfall with dogged resolve.

They seemed almost to know where they were going… as if something were pulling them forward. Aliza wondered often, as they again led her out of the thick coverage of the treeline and back onto the climbing path, if they had been here before.

If they were as anxious to return to the Underground as she was to get there.

At long last, as the sun was beginning to set over their second day stumbling up the mountainside, the butterflies fluttered together into a frenzy, pulling her gaze away from her introspective inspection of the city far below (it was so far away… they had come so far, and she'd never been prouder of something she'd accomplished herself) and to their crazed antics in the heavy evening air.

"Woah, woah! What is it? Did you find it?!"

They swooped off as one towards a cave just off the path up ahead, set on a grassy plateau bobbing with heavy headed, yellow buttercups (a strange, ominous feeling dropped out the pit of her stomach at the sight of them, pulling her lips into a frown), and Aliza turned on her heel to follow immediately, edging around the flowers as her quick walk broke into a run, attempting to keep up as the butterflies disappeared into the dark mouth of the cavern, their light swallowed up by the sheer blackness of its depths.

"Wait! Wait for me!" she called out, stumbling over her loose shoelaces and a scattering of gravel at the mouth of the cave, then let out a shrill shriek as she was about to step inside herself, flailing back when she nearly into a massive hole in the cavern's floor, yawning nearly to to encompass the entire cave.

The edge was draped with thick vines, heavy with waxy leaves and imposing thorns, but they wouldn't have halted the plunge she would have taken had she not stopped in time, and Aliza, panting and wide eyed in the coming dark of the evening, pressed a hand to her chest, attempting to ease her pounding heart.

"Oh _gods _, that was so close," she breathed, her pulse hammering in her ears as she considered the hole at a safe distance, toeing at a clump of vines with the tip of her tennis shoe; the cluster of butterflies, emerging from the dark at her oath, twirled over the massive chasm with evident glee, throwing gentle luminescence across a draping of stalactites scattered across the cave's ceiling. The craggy, clearly deep hole almost seemed to breathe, whistling with quiet winds and dripping with rivulets of shining dew from the recently passed thunderstorm; the stone Aliza scooped from the ground outside the cave's opening and dropped into it made no sound despite her long wait, evidencing it's obvious depth.

This was it, just like her mother's sketches… the entrance to the Underground, the most direct path to the land of magic and monsters. It was deeper than she had thought it would be, though she supposed she should have suspected it to be quite extensive; Frisk had said in the journal that she had fallen what felt like forever, when she had tripped inside as a young girl.

She'd just thought she was exaggerating.

Aliza, after a moment of thought (her rope wasn't going to be nearly long enough to make it to the cavern floor below), slid her pack over her shoulder and unzipped it to remove her paracord and head strap secured flashlight from within, considering the texture of the stone walls of the chasm as she ran the rope's length through the old, but sturdy, leather belt she had wrapped around her middle in early preparation.

Perhaps she could climb down the rest of the way… the walls looked pretty rough. She kind of wished she'd spent the money on the climbing pick like the salesman had suggested though, now...

Shaking her head and shrugging (she'd manage just fine; she had pretty strong hands, for an unassuming looking girl. Years of climbing fences and brick walls had given her a lot of added strength there), Aliza found a thick, sturdy pine tree near the plateau outside the cave mouth and tied her rope around it, knotting it over and over until she deemed it secure enough. She again approached the edge of the massive hole and, copying the climbers that she had watched on Discovery channel, edged herself over the precipice, nervously releasing the vines along the side and beginning her slow descent into the Underground.

Her progress down the steep tunnel was slow, inch by careful inch. She was nowhere near as confident as the rappelers on the tv had been, every motion painstaking and deliberate; her limbs quickly grew numb with cold and stress, her entire body shaking and her eyes straining to pick anything out of the darkness swallowing her. With dread unease, she watched the light of the surface disappear above her, first a gleam, then a pinprick, then sheer nothingness, the only illumination afforded her spilling from the flashlight atop her head and from the fluttering wings of her butterflies, flapping about her in the pressing, freezing dark.

Perhaps even more distressing was the silence, the weight of the stone about her echoing back only the scrape of her shoes against the walls, the gasp of her clouded breaths and her grunts of exertion; she had never felt more alone, and it was starting to get to her, the trickle of her near frozen sweat alarming her more and more often as the hours slipped away, as time ceased to mean anything in the long, lonely dark.

She began to fear she wasn't moving at all, paranoia and nerves clenching in her empty stomach, when she reached the literal end of her rope.

The knot she had made at the end jerked to a halt in the confines of the belt, worn smooth and a little hot by the friction of her descent, and Aliza jolted, alarmed by her sudden stop. She peered about her in the darkness, squinting at the still identical walls and the just as sheer blackness around her feet for any indication that she was near the end of her climb, spots swimming in her gaze and specks of moisture flecking onto her face from the perpetually dripping walls.

She couldn't tell. She couldn't see the ground below, if there even was one. It could as easily be another twenty feet as it could be another thousand.

She inhaled sharply through her nose, the frigid air stinging her already tight and aching lungs, glancing to her shoulders, where the butterflies had landed to rest over an hour before.

"No going back now, huh?"

She gripped at the rock wall, quickly finding hand and footholds to slot herself into (good… this was good), and, with a trembling exhalation, fumbled with the belt around her waist to separate herself from her lifeline, letting it and the rope free with a shaking hand a moment later.

It swung away from her in the dark, dangling just out of reach against the wall beside her, and Aliza sent a last, fearful look at it before reaching her foot below her in the darkness, feeling for another foothold with the toe of her sneaker and biting at her cracking, chapped bottom lip in concentration.

She found one, too, and another below it in quick succession; she felt a bolstering of spirit, her soul surging with confidence and excitement at her success…

Until, all at once, her handholds broke away from the stone wall, crumbling in her fingers and leaving her scrambling for purchase she simply couldn't find. Gravity grasped at her with inescapable claws, pulling her away from the wall with a rush of what felt almost like inevitability, and with a ragged shriek and a sinking in her stomach, despite the rushing of her butterfly companions attempting to push her back up, Aliza fell into the clutching, complete dark of the abyss, the scarlet glow of her eyes disappearing into the shadows swiftly.

It swallowed her and her screams whole, and all that remained of her passage was the rope swinging gently in the unearthly breeze as it swept through the tunnel, silent as the breath of the grave.

* * *

Let me know what ya thought 3


	2. Since When Were You the One in Control

**Chapter 2: Since When Were You the One in Control?**

* * *

_Aliza... Wake up _...

Cold. So cold.

Colder than the December wind, than the time the electricity had been turned off for two months of the winter. No amount of layers kept her warm, but this chill did more than make her flesh shiver. Freezing and bitter, like the icy silence of a broken friendship (or so she'd heard), like the empty pit of dread unknown.

Something was missing.

Something was wrong.

It was more than a feeling. More than an inkling, as light and life returned from the pressing dark, as feeling sank into dew and dust spattered skin. Sharp as glass, a knife's edge. It was like a memory, deja vu of the worst kind, a sickness that cut to the bone.

_Wake up. _

Something was wrong. She needed to get up, run, hide… _now _. But she couldn't move. Frozen, held down by a weight greater than she'd ever known; numb, like the feeling of the cold medicine her grandmother used to make her drink when she wouldn't go to sleep.

Paralyzed, an animal before a hunter, left with no other option than to face down her own death-

_Wake up. _

Aliza, with a gasp and a jolt like she'd been shocked, snapped her eyes open; the darkness pressed on her sight with an almost physical weight, boundless and unknowable. What had that voice been? Had there even been one? Where was she? What had happened?

...she'd been climbing down the hole in the mountain. She'd fallen. Fallen forever, screamed until her throat was raw… and passed out.

Was she dead? Was this what death was? Endless darkness?

She moved to sit up from… what was this around her? It felt like leaves, autumn leaves coated with moisture of some sort, crunching under her weight and poking at her uncomfortably. It took some effort, and a little time for the dizziness to pass (she was starving… how long had she fallen? How long had she been unconscious?), but she managed it, leaning on her right arm and attempting to brush some of the leaves from herself in the fathomless dark with her free hand.

White hot pain shot through her body like a bolt of lightning, her senses careening from numbed shock, to mystified confusion, to blinding agony in seconds. She couldn't breathe, the air forced from her body on an agonized exhalation; she couldn't move, forced back to the ground as her right arm failed her.

It was all she could do not to scream.

Choking on the tears of pain flowing down her face and grasping at her clearly injured left arm, Aliza blinked blearily, red and white lights blinking in and out against the neverending backdrop of blackness that swallowed her whole.

What was that? Was she passing out again? She really hoped not. She needed to move, and fast; the feeling of wrongness that had woken her from her impromptu slumber still pressed at her, urging her to action, at the very least to escape her current whereabouts.

There was something about these leaves that her subconscience did _not _like, and she'd long ago learned to trust her instincts.

Blinking again to clear the glaze of persistent tears from her eyes (and attempt, again, to gain her bearing in the absolute dark), Aliza, belatedly and with a surge of relief in the face of familiarity, finally recognized what the lights floating around her face frantically were.

It was the butterflies. Her friends, brushing her nose and her hair with their wings, attempting to rouse her. Ruby seemed particularly bothered, more energetic than she'd ever seen her, darting off a few feet into the dark, in the same direction each time, before flying back and fluttering in tight, agitated circles.

Gasping through her racking sobs, on a wave of forced back bile that threatened to overwhelm her, Aliza again attempted to sit up, forcing her body, with more determination than she'd realized she possessed, to hold her own weight. Her head pounded from the exertion, her eyes leaked even more tears from the sheer agony of the meager action. The butterflies, throwing spots of illumination around her surroundings that she couldn't spare the concentration to investigate yet, flitted around her in discordance, but she had little mind to pay them.

She needed to figure out what to do about her arm. She knew, just from feeling (tenderly, hesitantly) along its length that it was broken, in at least two places. She'd had broken bones before, though they had always healed incredibly quickly, baffling her pediatricians (when her grandmother had still bothered to take her). This was different though, somehow. Something hard was sticking out of it, jagged and unnatural.

It took her numb, slow thoughts a moment to realize it was the bone.

The bile rose again to coat her tongue, and this time she couldn't hold it back. She vomited as far from herself as her shattered arm would allow her, whimpering and trembling in miserable agony; her stomach heaved itself empty in moments, but rocked her body with gags and dry retches for what seemed an eternity afterwards.

The pain was unreal. She hadn't ever been this injured, not in her memory… her mind could barely grasp it.

With what felt like herculean effort, Aliza finally forced her stomach to settle, and wiped ineffectually at her face with her working arm's sleeve, the mucus and saliva and acid catching the bare, guttering light of the flitting butterflies in the air around her. She resisted the shudders that shook her body at the effort, the desire she had to lay back on the ground and just go back to sleep.

She needed to pull herself together. Broken arm or not, she had work to do, and sitting here shaking wasn't going to get it done.

First, her bearings. She needed to get a look around her, try to get her head straight. Then, her supplies. Her backpack was no longer strapped to her back; it had to be around here somewhere. After that, she'd worry about her arm and eating.

Everything she needed was in that pack, from the souls she needed to make sure had survived to another flashlight (the one that had been strapped to her head was missing as well) to food to bandages and an extra shirt that she could, at the very least, make a sling from.

She wished she'd done more research on injuries. She knew there was something she could do to further stabilize broken limbs, but she didn't know what it was.

With a heavy sigh, a wince of pain at the crick in her neck, and a rustling of the leaves around her, Aliza looked warily around her surroundings, grimacing at the pain in her arm and squinting to try to make anything, anything at all stand out from the gloom. Useless. The only light came from the butterflies, now settled on her broken arm but still flapping in obvious upset (could they feel the wrongness too? Likely as not), and from far above, a pinprick of golden luminescence in the dark, both too dim to be usable.

Her stomach soured at her last observation, her neck aching as she craned her head back to gaze at the far off entrance to the caverns her mother had described in her journal. She had said it was an incredible distance to fall, but the reality of it rang with a note of mortal horror.

It was a miracle that she had only broken her arm… she could have _died _.

Shaking her head (another wince; she needed to stop doing that, let her neck recover first), and dismissing a momentary consideration of calling to her fire magic (that would likely not go well, considering the dry leaves surrounding her, saying nothing of the power's instability), Aliza slowly, painstakingly, reached out in the darkness around her with her uninjured hand, eyes wide in the pressing dark and bracing for the unknown.

Dread and wariness, like a slush of ice, had been running through her veins ever since she'd come to, and she didn't want to encounter what was not only making her instincts go crazy, but what was setting Ruby off so badly as well.

It must be bad. Perhaps a predatory animal… or something worse.

She hoped for the former.

Luckily, her fingers brushed the familiar nylon of her pack's strap only feet from where she lay, and she pulled it closer with a surge of relief flooding her drained, exhausted body, scrabbling for the zipper and smiling happily out of sheer habit, despite the gravity of her situation.

That was one thing she'd learned, in the depths of her suffering with her so called guardian; things couldn't be so bad if you could smile. It was how she got through a great deal of it, before she'd found purpose, the journal, her mission. She smiled, and carried on, despite it all.

She liked to think her mother would have done the same.

Within the pack in her searching hands were all the items she had sought, namely the jar of souls (miraculously unbroken, and filled with the sleepily drifting souls she had so carefully gathered) and the extra flashlight, a large, handheld affair with a sturdy handle that she immediately turned on.

She took a quick look around herself with it before delving further into her pack, discovering herself to be in some sort of cavern, small enough that she could see all the walls from her position but large enough to echo with the drips of moisture that seemed to fall perpetually from the tunnel she had descended.

Dimly, she was able to make out what appeared to be murals on the rugged, purplish stone of the cavern walls, too faint to make out in the darkness at this distance, with long, thick tendrils of an unknown species of ivy climbing those same walls, strung with leaves and bristling with spiny thorns. There was a the sheen of several pieces of garbage littering the cave, her completely shattered forehead flashlight among them (gods, that could have been her head), what looked like an exit to the room in one far off corner, surrounded by cracking pillars and holding ever more impenetrable darkness…

And she now knew, with a long, hard look under the beam of her light, what she had landed in to not be leaves at all, but piles upon piles of moldering, brownish flower petals, as deep as her forearm and spattered, in rivulets and pools, with what could only be her own blood.

She held back another retch, paling at the sight of how much she had lost (no wonder she could barely see straight…), before clearing some of the crimson splattered blooms aside and setting the flashlight on its flat end beside her, the beam shining up to the fathomlessly deep cavern entrance overhead, and digging further into her pack in search of sustenance and healing.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore how severely unprepared she had been for this journey, given the current circumstances. Not only had she drastically underestimated the size of the mountain and the distance down the tunnel, she hadn't even considered the possibility of becoming incapacitated, especially not this early.

The reality of her narrowly avoided demise wasn't very far from her mind either, the splintered glass of her other flashlight glittering like an omen only feet away.

She had little doubt that something in her magical blood had saved her from being smashed to a pulp. The dried petals wouldn't have been nearly enough to keep her alive, not after a fall like that… but that didn't feel like all that had spared her, either. Grateful as she was to whatever power she had inherited from her mother, the blessed regeneration and durability she had been gifted by her birth, the foul inkling that niggled at the back of her mind was ceaseless, ceaseless as her butterfly companions' flutterings about her injured arm and her bowed head.

There was something _off _about this place, she could feel it in the air, in the ground… in the petals she was surrounded by, that crunched and prodded at her with her every movement. It felt like what she had always hesitated to call magic, unsure and untaught. It certainly wasn't like the tranquility she had felt from the souls, each time she had captured one, nor like the static and erratic heat of her own power, desperately being held back even as she thought of it. _Nothing _like the calm peace of Ruby.

This felt… heavy. Dirty and invasive, like it was trying to choke her. Corroded and rotten, as dead as the field of flowers around her.

It beckoned, almost like it… knew her.

Without conscious thought, nor her consent, Aliza's fingers slipped from within her pack to dig into the dirt beneath her, crushing dead, golden blooms (golden? Why had she thought that? They were brown, as brown as her drying blood) and withered leaves, worming into the soil in search of… what? The magic that was calling to her, that had possibly saved her on her descent? She didn't know, and the moment that she realized she was doing it, she pulled her hand back, shaking her head to clear her mind and breathing heavily, as though she had just fought off an assailant.

She needed to calm down and focus. Nothing was there, it was just the blood loss and the shock getting to her.

Steeling her will and flagging resolve, she turned back to her bag and immediately tore open the first granola bar she found, shoving half into her mouth and letting the free end dangle while she chewed and sought out her roll of bandages.

It was going to be fine. Things weren't going to plan, but from her experience, few things ever did. She needed to be adaptable to succeed in her endeavor, and she was glad to say that that was one of her strengths.

Finally, at the very bottom of the bag, she found both the worn out shirt and the tatty bandages she had scavenged from the disused medicine cabinet at the house, and quickly zipped her backpack up and unrolled both bunches of fabric so she could at the very least patch herself up before hightailing it out of here.

The white butterflies were a vortex of nerves darting around her head, brushing her cheeks and, she was sure, petal strewn hair intermittently, and Ruby herself was prodding impatiently at her hand, saying nothing of the sickness twisting in her gut the longer she stayed.

Whatever the power that resided in this room was, she didn't want to-

"You're not going to get far like that."

Aliza's heart nearly leapt from her chest, fear and alarm setting her nerves, and nearly her hands, ablaze, and she immediately abandoned her bandages to scrabble desperately for the flashlight beside her. She missed, the first time, sending the light source spinning nearly out of reach; her second attempt was tinged with pain, as she jolted her limp, injured arm trying to reach where the flashlight had landed, half buried in a pile of wilted, flaking flowers.

She spun in place the moment it was in hand, forcing herself to her feet and backing away from what she thought was the source of the voice even as she searched for it with the beam of the flashlight, her eyes bright red in her panic. It had been tiny, sweet and melodic, but had immediately only set her more on edge, further soured the ball of anxiety curdling in her stomach.

"H-hello?" she called timidly into the dark, more reluctant to do so than she ever had been by anything in her life, including climbing down the hole in the mountain, and it was then, in the erratically searching path of the light in her hand, that Aliza saw something that had _not _been there a moment before.

Some_ one _that had not been there before.

Standing in what appeared to be the exact center of the small gathering of dead flowers, at the very edge of the spray of blood that had come from her own arm, was a clearly human child, petite and as delicate as their voice had sounded only a moment before.

They wore a light and dark green striped sweater and khaki shorts, a tattered looking red scarf wrapped loosely around their neck, but no shoes, had straight auburn hair cropped neatly around their ears, and were watching her, with a small smile, through eyes that glinted a stark, uncommon scarlet, refracting back at her like a cat's in the dark.

It wasn't the eyes that caught her attention the most, though they set a jolt of uneasiness through her that made her head swim, her ears ring and pound. It was that tiny, almost ironic smile, indented with cutely blushing cheeks and a button nose. It was the way the skin around it had writhed, when the light had touched it.

Aliza had never felt more repulsed by anyone than by this seemingly innocuous, innocent child, their arms swinging charmingly at their sides, no more than eight or nine by appearance.

It must just be the way they had appeared, so suddenly and without warning, that was setting her off. ...through the dark, with no visible light. ...completely alone.

Right.

They said nothing in response to her query, only tilting their head in silence, and Aliza, the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck standing on edge, cleared her throat and slowly bent to snag her pack under her working arm before quickly returning to light to illuminate the odd child.

...were they closer than they'd been a second ago?

"Um. C-can you... help me? I broke my arm, when I fell, and I need help," she asked cautiously, not drawing a step closer to them, not with the alarm buzzing in the back of her skull, the way her familiars had landed, still as statues, on her shoulders, but the child, again, said nothing, only turning their head to look past her, unblinkingly, into the pressing dark all around them.

The longer the silence stretched, the more her magic roiled within her flesh, ready to protect her at a moment's notice.

"You shouldn't have come," they finally said, after a long moment of unnerving quiet, just as Aliza opened her mouth to ask again, thinking they hadn't heard her; the sudden statement made the girl flinch, surprised and thrown off guard by the unexpected answer. She blinked slowly, uncomprehending, as a chill of more than foreboding ran up her spine.

"W-what do you-" she began, her throat closing slightly in her mounting distress, but the child interrupted her, their eerily large, too shiny eyes moving back to meet hers.

"The world has changed. You're not going to survive here, not how you are now."

It took everything in her not to run right then and there.

Aliza clenched her sweaty hand more tightly around her flashlight, and tightened her jaw, forcing herself to stay where she was, to face down this… thing.

"I- look, I just need some help getting to the… the monsters that are supposed to be down here, can you take me to them? At least point me in the right direction?"

The child's unnerving eyes crinkled in mirth, at that, an almost cruel smile splitting their porcelain face in two; a small, tinkling laugh echoed through the hollow cavern oddly, as though coming from nowhere and everywhere at once. Their gaze seemed to flicker to the insects cowering on her shoulders for a moment.

The child's smile was smaller, now, more composed, but just as cruel, as cold and sharp as their sinister laughter.

"Oh, how precious... What did she tell you? To sing and dance and make them all your _friends _?"

The chilling laugh petered out to the whisper of a giggle, tutting and punctuated with a long hiss, like a snake through grass, and Aliza backed away a step, careful and cautious.

"Who are you? Why are you here?" she questioned in near accusation, wracking her mind for any mention of this creature in her mother's journal, any at all (she had spoken of many monsters, hundreds compiled in the rambling pages, yet had never mentioned this being), but again, the child ignored her, taking a step forward for the one Aliza had retreated.

Their mouth quirked. The scent of decay and rot permeated the air, choking her more thoroughly than her own dread. She took another step back, away from the still approaching child, now walking along the edge of the flashlight's beam.

"You look like her, you know. Frisky bits. Same hair, same face… different eyes, though. Different soul. ...the real question here, is who are _you _. _What _are you, maybe even more. Something weird. Maybe even _magic _," they said with a gleam in their eye (the closer the being got, the more sunken those shining eyes seemed, the more sallow the skin around them), and though everything within her demanded she turn tail and flee immediately, the odd child's words, the inference in their meaning, halted Aliza's retreat, her eyes wide and her heart in her throat.

Could it be? Could this creature have known Frisk? Known about the magic?

"You knew my mother?" she queried in a rush, clutching at her flashlight so hard that her knuckles turned white, and the child, with a tittering laugh and a knowing, ironic look, disappeared from the light entirely, flickering for a moment before simply _not being there at all _.

Aliza yelped at the suddenness of their disappearance, turning on the spot and looking all over the cavern for where they must have run to (no no, it was magic, she knew it was magic, it had to be), tripping over a pile of aluminum cans before finally finding them again in the dark, sitting atop a worn stone marker on the very edge of the spread of dead flowers.

She'd have been willing to call the marker a gravestone, if she could see it more closely.

"Oh, I knew her," the child remarked with a remarkable air of lackadaisy, kicking their legs in place. "Nice girl. Bit too nice, got in the way of everything… but she wasn't right for the job anyway. Maybe I needed a different sort of human… part of both worlds, heh eh heh… you don't even know, do you? Exactly what kind of freak you are. Poor Frisky, died for nothing."

The creature's final comment was crass and cruel, and Aliza flinched, doing her very best not to drop her chin in shame.

She dared not look away from the being, terrified of it moving closer to her then it already was when she wasn't watching, and at the same time fighting back tears and angry retorts. Wasn't it enough that she had had to deal with that, the knowledge that she had been the great Frisk's downfall, from everyone else her entire life? Did she really need it from this… this thing too?

Her misery seemed to only energize the child across the room, watching the tears bead in her eyes with what appeared to be _relish _, and that was enough to pull her from her anguish and into fury, glaring at the being with all the determination she could muster.

"Do you know why she left? What happened to separate her from her home?" she demanded, gesturing at large to the cavern around them, and the child leaned their too sharp chin on one hand, tilting their head and tutting mockingly.

Aliza clenched her sweaty hand tighter around the handle of her flashlight, the strap of her pack slipping low on her good shoulder and perspiration, despite the chilling cold, dripping from under her hair and down her neck. This creature was infuriating...

"Her bleeding heart couldn't save them forever, he he he… only made it worse. Azzy got impatient, didn't he? So lonely, too lonely, too empty, heh… idiot mucked it up worse than ever. He broke the world, you know. Broke it like mother's head, ha! And now they're aaaaall dead. Dead inside, dust and blood, and the rest will try to eat yooooou~" the being replied in a hypnotic, sing song voice, rocking in place atop their mock throne.

Skepticism and hard learned cynicism lowered Aliza's brows, firming her disgusted grimace.

This could very well be a cruel trick from a very sadistic child. Or… whatever they were. She had no idea what their game was… but it wasn't beneficial to her, she was sure of that, and was wasting her time here.

"Yeah, well, I don't believe you. The monsters aren't like that, Frisk said-" she began stubbornly, half turning away to look around her feet for her fallen t-shirt and bandages, but jumped in place, nearly dropping her flashlight entirely, at the burst of crazed, raucous laughter that the child let out, bowled over to the ground at the foot of its former seat in a pile of dead flower petals.

They didn't make a sound, as they rolled among them, didn't crush a single one, only continued to laugh so hard they cried what looked, in the shaky beam of the flashlight, to be tears of black blood.

"**_Ha ha ha…_**Love and compassion and hope, right? _Ha _! Ha ha, he he, didn't matter in the end, did it? Couldn't help it, could they? Ha ha... Went crazy, every last one. Ripped each other to pieces, and ate each other up. He he… couldn't have done it better myself," they chortled, cackling wildly from their oddly silent bed of petals.

Aliza, her blood running ever colder, stilled where she stood, the fear and pain and blood loss and sickness and cold all colliding in her mind to form a perfect storm of confusion and erratic mania, so discordant that she didn't know which voice was hers, which was the being's laughing uproariously across the room…

And which was the one that had begun to whisper softly in the back of her mind, paired with an urging so gentle it felt like a breeze, summer light, pushing her towards the only exit in the room.

Her butterfly companions, disturbed by her motion to retrieve her makeshift bandages, seemed to be echoing the urging of whatever instinct lived deep inside her, Ruby dodging away from both her and the child to flit indicatively towards the tall archway in the shadows to the east.

But another voice was tearing at her psyche, wearing away at her already fragile mental state, and it wasn't nearly as pleasant as the whispering wind that cooled and soothed her anguished mind; it was the hacking, carrying, nearly too ecstatic laughter of the being staring, upside down and wide eyed, at her from the ground.

Their words were doing something to her brain, fuzzing and confusing her, distorting everything and turning the edges of her vision black and numbing her tongue, the tips of her fingers.

She shook her head to restore the feeling to it as she took a wary step back towards the exit, her legs and mind feeling sluggish.

"That's not possible," she insisted doggedly, not wanting to look at them any longer.

"More than possible, hehehe… and it's understandable, isn't it? They just got **_hungry_**," they tittered, something hard and meaningful in the final word they spoke, and as they said it, the cavern around her ceased to be.

About her feet was a bloodbath. A city in flames, soaked in blood and dust. A fiendish demon, tearing monsters apart and screeching at a sunset of fire. Parents consuming their own children, feasting on their flesh only to come to their senses and destroy themselves in suicide. Sickening hedonism, traps made of the bones of fallen victims, graves opened only to be consumed… and above it all, the sounds of screams, screams unending, the deaths of tens of thousands of the weak to feed the strong. The screams of the innocent, consumed alive, before their time.

Her screams, as she choked on her own vomit and tears, spilled again over the browned and blackened flower petals at her feet.

"Tragic, isn't it?"

Aliza nearly slipped and fell in the pool of vomit she had just gagged up before her, as she scrambled away from the voice beside her ear so quickly, her heart in her throat and her eyes scarlet, wide in an attempt to clear both the nightmare vision and the tears from her gaze.

Her vision was spotty, adjusting again to the gloom, but there, only inches from where she had stood only moments before, was the child, grinning ear to ear like a badly painted doll.

It had had no eyes, the nightmare vision, and when it smiled, maggots had dripped from its empty mouth. Its skin was slime, dripping from its yellowed bones, and within its rotton husk resided a shadow, deeper than the blackest night she had ever known.

Aliza screamed again, her butterflies in a flurry around her and her hands smoking, almost set ablaze in her distress.

She couldn't run, and the child's voice _was in her head _.

"What did I tell you, hmmm? What do you think of them now? It's nothing but the truth, you know~ I have no reason to lie."

The teenager choked on a haggard cry, the voice trying to press those images again into her mind.

She couldn't think. She couldn't breathe.

It couldn't all be lost already.

"How did this happen… _Why _..." she sobbed, and the creature, with a glint in their eyes that looked far too much like longing to be innocence, followed her retreat, reaching out with a hand far less than human to brush her tear from her cheek, faux in their caring, but insistent in their pressing coercion. Aliza shuddered, but couldn't move to pull away.

"It's who they are, Aliza. They're _monsters _, it's in the design. Abominations, now, one and all. Sad, though, isn't it? That they're all insane, made to do whatever it takes to survive. Kill or be killed, teehee. All because of one stupid little flower~"

Their words were a sour vine, clinging and choking, stealing away fact and reason and leaving behind the fear they had instilled in her; she struggled, her gaze following, with horror, a short, fat maggot that crawled from their eye socket and down to their nose, but even that couldn't break her from the haze the vision had put over her mind, the paralyzing toxin of fear that sank into her blood with each pump of her heart.

Only the gentle whisper at the back of her mind, stalwart and steady, held true, and at long last did she hear its voice, silvery and calm as the moon's glow:

_You never told them your name, starlight… how do they know your name? _

She was too far gone. She must have said her name. It wasn't outrageous to assume. Such a small detail.

"...it is sad."

And it was. She didn't want this to happen to them. She had wanted to help them as much as Frisk had… that was what she had come here for…

When had the creature gotten so close to her face? She didn't even flinch, her head swaying slowly as the numbness that had threatened the tips of her fingers, her toes, crept up her arms and legs, stealing away her sense of self. She was losing awareness of everything around her… she couldn't feel the cool of the air anymore. The pain in her head, her stomach, her arm, was distant, foreign.

Even the smell of death was fading away, almost unnoticeable, despite the being hovering inches from her nose. A blur of red fluttered between their faces, attacking the being's offal filled nasal cavity, but it was gone in a flash of fingers and a soft squeal of pain.

"We could help them, you and me. We could show them mercy, couldn't we? Save them from this world. The unfairness of their fate."

The creature touched her arm, and in a flash of absolute black, Aliza felt _nothing _, blissful nothingness. No pain, no fear, no self-hatred, the thoughts of her worthless life abated for the first time in years. It was so... peaceful. She felt… strong, like a big cup had fallen over her weakness while another had scooped up a power deep inside her soul, flooding her body with warmth.

The presence, once sour, but now so strong and wonderful, surrounded her. It would save them, it promised. All she had to do… was surrender.

"We… we could…"

Aliza had the faint feeling of her arm being caressed, and blinked when she saw a hand held in front of her face. Like a handshake. A partnership.

Take it.

Yes.

Do it.

**Finally**.

"Take my hand, and together we can make it aaaall right again."

_Stop! _

Aliza's mind shook away from the numbness minutely, drunk on the fog of… whatever it was that was happening, just enough to hear the silvery voice again. It was clamoring for her attention, shouting for it in fact. She could barely pay attention…

Her eyes were already starting to close. She was so tired. She just needed to make this deal... Chara would take care of the rest.

...who was Chara?

_Do you see what they do? They invade the mind. Steal control and manipulate however they can to do their will. They weren't always like this. It didn't have to be this way, and has only gotten worse. But you cannot go with them, my light. You must go. Now. _

Aliza blinked, stirred by the voice. That couldn't be right… this being had been her friend…

_Remember what they truly look like, Aliza. Remember how they move, how they speak, but most of all, their motives, how they spoke of the monsters and your family. They are not your friend. Magic can be kind, but this magic is not. Break free, precious. Quickly! _

...the voice was right. The creature hadn't wanted to help her… it wanted something else. She could feel the twisted wrongness in its mean, the poison in its intent, and, with all her might, with a surge of her soul and the strongest flare of fire that she could summon, Aliza _pushed, _back and away from the being that had her in its rotted grasp.

"**No**!" she screamed, her voice hoarse from her sobs and her fingers tingling from the dismissal of the numbness (her limp arm was in an agony of pain again, razors of anguish running down her entire left side), but she didn't linger to see what effect her fireball nor her scream did to the creature, turning tail and running headlong into the dark.

The white butterflies awaited her beside the cracked arches that led out of the enormous cavern, fluttering like mad about a sign that she couldn't understand in the guttering light of her flashlight, and on the floor, beside one of the crenelated columns, lay Ruby, one of her wings bent at the tip.

Laughter, mad, cackling laughter echoed behind her, but Aliza wasn't about to abandon her oldest friend. She stuffed her flashlight under her arm, bent to scoop the flailing, reaching insect into her hand, and ran on, into the unknown.

* * *

Chara watched the strange girl disappear into the shadows, and casually stretched their apparition's arms over their head lazily. A new game after so long… it deserved a new flair. And they knew the perfect addition.

It didn't matter that they'd gotten the inspiration from Aliza herself, they thought with a wicked grin and a snide snicker.

Plagiarism was a weak term for ingenuity, after all.

Stubby fingers clawed at their cheeks, the rotting skin easily sloughing off, blood and blackened, clotting tar oozing around exposed teeth that they ran their rotting, cyst covered tongue over with relish.

Holding out their hand, the riggling flesh within slipped from their grasp and into the air, following after their new playmate. Chara couldn't help but giggle in glee, clapping their gore covered hands together and skipping back to their headstone, kicking dead petals covered in vomit and blood as they went into the air.

Oh, they were _very _excited to be playing again… and couldn't wait to see how this pawn played along.

* * *

Leave us a good word!


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